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The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

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Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#41

Post by oddevan »

Kiro wrote: post #13

Technological innovation is more important than any job.

Can you elaborate? For example, what is the end-goal of technological innovation? What's the end-goal of any job?

To me, the point of innovation is to make people's lives better. Growing pains, a temporary loss of one type of job, those are inevitable when talking about innovation. But people adapt, they get new jobs, sometimes enabled by the very innovations that displaced them in the first place. That's fine, that's the pattern in the world so far.

A blanket statement like this seems to say that progress for its own sake should be prioritized over the people said progress is supposed to help.

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#42

Post by knowtheory »

[deleted] wrote: post #40
istjohn wrote: post #2

Current top comment: I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down…

[deleted]

Your judgementalness is showing.

There are equally likely explanations for people sitting around drinking. Maybe they don't work first shift. Maybe they're on vacation. Maybe they're disabled for some reason.

The fact that you leap to "oh the government pays them to be unemployed" is on you, not the government or them.

(also note that it's increasingly difficult to get SNAP benefits in states due to budget cut backs)

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#43

Post by dragonwriter »

TuringTest wrote: post #32
grinnbearit wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why a basic income? I propose basic welfare, food + clothing + shelter, even entertainment. Mass produced in order to minimise costs. Then allocate a fixed amount of tax revenue to fund it, say 10%. Then as productivity goes up and goods become cheaper, this 10% can provide even more. Let money be what it is, a claim on goods and services provided for by other people. With basic welfare no one is forced into work out…

The idea of the government issuing a basic income is that people can choose in their own way how to get food, clothing and shelter, instead of having to settle with whatever the government provides. Moreover, it would discourage working to get more money, since if you want to move into a less frugal home, you would lose all the benefits of having a government issued one. That choice would then be seen as a net lose.

> The idea of the government issuing a basic income is that people can choose in their own way how to get food, clothing and shelter, instead of having to settle with whatever the government provides.

More fundamentally, in my view, is that basic income represents the citizens pro rata share of a portion of taxation that represents rents on the commons; the purpose government serves is to collect and distribute for efficiency as N:1 + 1:M interchanges involve transaction costs for N+M transactions rather than the N*M that are required for N:M direct transactions, but government has no reason to choose how the rents are spent (and there are, as you note, all kinds of pragmatic downsides when the government does that.)

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#44

Post by DanielBMarkham »

istjohn wrote: post #2

Current top comment: I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down…

So we're just done with providing natural stress on the population, where each person strives to learn and do things that other people appreciate? Instead, we provide the option for "checking out" and getting paid no matter what?

Even if I bought into the narrative of the end of useful labor, which I don't, and even if I bought into the narrative of people who can't be trained, which I don't, the economics of this don't make any sense to me.

I wouldn't oppose it, though. Instead let's get a few dozen small experiments going, see how they work out. Even bad ideas are good if you can learn from them. The real enemy to progress is the idea that we are forced to either reject new ideas like this in their entirety or embrace them at some huge scale.

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#45

Post by sumeno »

[deleted] wrote: post #40
istjohn wrote: post #2

Current top comment: I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down…

[deleted]

There are still more than 2 unemployed people per job opening in the US.[1] So there is in fact a lack of jobs and work needing to be done.

[1] http://www.bls.gov/web/jolts/jlt_labstatgraphs.pdf

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#46

Post by jbattle »

forca wrote: post #11
Loughla wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I legitimately do not believe that this would work in the US before an extreme collapse of the current system - including but not limited to a civil war. I believe this because we have a hard enough time pushing through cursory and very basic social welfare programs. Quite literally guaranteeing someone a basic income with 0 work involved would be as palatable as thumb tacks to many individuals in the states. Logic d…

Thank you, Tea Party (yes, I'm being sarcastic). The far right in this country have driven home their stupid Ayn Rand message and too many people have listened. We now have the most polarized government since the Civil War. The right believe that their way is the only way. To them everything is a zero sum game. I would settle for a Scandinavian or Swiss-style system. The older I get, the less I like capitalism as des…

The angle to take would be that this system, being much simpler than our current network of welfare & social security systems - would require a vastly smaller government to administer it.

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#47

Post by pconner »

istjohn wrote: post #2

Current top comment: I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down…

This sounds a lot like the world in Vonnegut's "Player Piano"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Player_Piano_(novel)

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#48

Post by dragonwriter »

grinnbearit wrote: post #18
istjohn wrote: post #2

Current top comment: I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down…

Why a basic income? I propose basic welfare, food + clothing + shelter, even entertainment. Mass produced in order to minimise costs. Then allocate a fixed amount of tax revenue to fund it, say 10%. Then as productivity goes up and goods become cheaper, this 10% can provide even more. Let money be what it is, a claim on goods and services provided for by other people. With basic welfare no one is forced into work out…

> Why a basic income? I propose basic welfare, food + clothing + shelter, even entertainment. Mass produced in order to minimise costs.

Because basic income respects human freedom, and as automation advances and the rewards of the economy in pure-market terms increasingly shift even further from labor to capital, a basic income that is adjusted in amount as the economy shifts provides a comparatively light touch redistribution represent rents on the commons that maintains opportunity (as the recipients can choose how to allocate the basic income between present consumption needs and investment in personal development and/or capital) whereas "basic welfare" creates a permanently dependent, effectively unfree, class with no mobility, opportunity, or effective choices.

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#49

Post by wcummings »

m0nty wrote: post #3

This is a serious and interesting subject which requires a better treatment than emotive words like "hand-wringing" and "worriers", and a conclusion with more depth than "in the long run, we're all dead." All the author really says is that experts disagree on the effects of automation (who would have guessed?) and that this might lead to lower pay and fewer jobs (again, hardly news). Meaningless assertions like "the…

>"in the long run, we're all dead."

On a long enough timeline...

Re: The New Luddites: What if technological innovation is a job-killer after all?

#50

Post by [deleted] »

[deleted] wrote: post #40
istjohn wrote: post #2

Current top comment: I think the answer is fairly straightforward: create a guaranteed minimum income. Tax all income after that. As productivity goes up, you increase the guaranteed minimum income. If you want more than the minimum, you go out and work, and the people who have only skills that can be done by a computer/robot more cheaply than a minimum wage work just leave the work force. Should productivity go down…

[deleted]

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